Don't Go 'Down There'

  In 1965, Sylvia Likens was tortured for three months by a family in Indiana, until she died. Among other abominations, the woman charged with looking after her, Gertrude Baniszewski, carved the words "I am a prostitute and proud of it" into her abdomen. Now we can add the play Down There to the atrocities committed against poor Sylvia.  

A hallucinatory experience, Down There is a muddle of unexplained behavior, quicksilver mood changes and just plain bad writing. Playwright Randy Sharp has said that she is less interested in what happened to Sylvia than in why, but that certainly never comes across here. In Sharp’s version, Casey Kindens (Lynn Mancinelli) and her polio-stricken sister Joyce (Regina Betancourt, who never utters a word) are dropped off by their mother at the home of the clearly disturbed Pat Menckl (Laurie Kilmartin). Pat will care for Casey and Joyce for $20 a week, while their mother tends to her own ill sister. Before long, Pat and her other assorted charges—including niece Paula (Britt Genelin), neighborhood kids Rickie (David Crabb) and John (Brian Barnhart) and Pat’s mentally disabled son Jim (George Demas)—are tormenting Casey, who smilingly accepts their taunts and rants as some sort of hazing ritual before she’s fully accepted in the house.

The most explanation Sharp (who also directs) gives audiences is that the kids are either thrilled that Pat’s wrath is focused on someone else or driven slightly mad by their burgeoning sexuality (that last refuge for bad horror films involving poltergeists and exorcisms). In Jim’s case, he does it to please Pat enough so that she’ll let him rejoin an after-school group.

And that’s about it. Sharp’s Pat is so distracted by her asthma and back pain that she lashes out at those around her— and she is also incapable of dealing with her drunken husband (Jim Sterling)—but there’s never really a reason for her to focus her rage on Casey, except that Sharp has directed Mancinelli to be so simpering that it’s tempting for even the audience to slap her once or twice. A hallucinatory experience, Down There is a muddle of unexplained behavior, quicksilver mood changes and just plain bad writing. For the show’s 80-minute duration, we’re subjected to dim lighting, twitchy performances (why is Kilmartin constantly caressing her lap?) and inexplicable behavior. In the middle of blaming the over-worked Casey for the smell emanating from the bathroom, Pat and John begin to argue over the respective merits of Ajax over Comet as a cleaning supply. Not to mention the frequent references to Paula being fat and/or pregnant, though Genelin is actually quite slim, or the creepy, borderlineincestuous conversations between Pat and Jim. Perhaps Sharp is trying to underline some larger point by directing Demas to make Jim the most eloquent speaker of the group, but then why create a mentally disabled character in the first place?

What Sharp delineates most clearly in Down There is not how a group of people ranging widely in age and life experience could treat another human being the way Sylvia Likens was treated, but that sometimes, bad things just happen. The same goes for theater, as it turns out.

-- Down There Through Oct. 30, Axis Theatre, 1 Sheridan Sq. (at Barrow St.), 212-352-3101; $20.